Louis Murphy: It Sure Looked Like A Catch To Me

I hate to feed fans of the Oakland Raiders anything. This is a franchise whose fanbase is already convinced that there's some mass conspiracy in the NFL officiating booths to screw the Raiders over every game. Why? I don't know. What reason would NFL refs have to hate the Raiders? Did Al Davis just take a dump in all of their hats one day? Regardless, there's this perception of the Raiders not actually being a bad team, but getting screwed by the refs every week.

The way that play looked to me, Murphy caught the ball, got both feet down, and THEN started to go to the ground. He wasn't in the act of going to the ground when the catch itself was made. He caught the ball, got the feet down, then got taken to the ground. The TD would and should have occurred before his falling happened.

Even given the rest, after he hit the ground, here's the sequence of the play as I see it:

1. Murphy hits the ground.2. The ball jiggles a little bit.3. The ball jiggles a little more.4. As Murphy starts to get up, he lets go of the ball.

It's entirely possible I'm wrong here. The NFL has access to several different views that we as TV viewers do not. Maybe one of those views had conclusive evidence to overturn the play.

Even in that case, however, this is entirely too complicated of a process. To quote former Raiders coach and retired broadcaster John Madden, "I remember when a catch was a catch."

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